Systems, methods and devices for networking over a network

Abstract

The present disclosure is related to systems, methods, and processor readable media for distributing digital data over networks. Certain embodiments relate to systems, methods, and devices used within such networks where at least a substantial portion of the interconnected devices are capable of interacting with one or more neighboring devices, and then to form such a network either with no gateway and/or control point, with a single gateway and/or control point or with a number of gateways and/or control points.

The invention claimed is: 
     
       1. A method for distributing digital data to and from a plurality of devices over a mesh network connecting a large number of devices receiving and transmitting relatively small amounts of data, comprising:
 generating at least one data packet from digital data suitable for transmission over the mesh network; 
 transmitting the at least one data packet to a plurality of devices connected via a suitable topology, wherein the at least one data packet is transmitted in a hopping fashion from one device to another device along a route until the packet is received by at least one gateway, 
 wherein the network has a centralized configuration and is connected to a central computer; 
 wherein the relatively small amounts of data received and transmitted by the plurality of devices is such that an amount of data originating from an individual device from the plurality of devices is less than at least one of the following amounts: 1 bit, 8 bits, 16 bits, and 48 bits; 
 wherein the data originating from the individual device is appended to the data received from at least 5, 25, 100, 500, 1000, 10,000 or 1,000,000 other devices of the plurality of devices and the aggregated data from the devices is transmitted to at least one next device; 
 and wherein the data is transmitted and received in predefined amounts at predefined times using at least one predefined resource thus resulting in at least one of the following:
 interference and collisions within the network being substantially avoided, such that the percentage of broken links out of a total number of links in the network is limited to at least one of the following percentages: 0.01%, 0.1%, 1%, 2%, 5% or 20%; 
 at least one device entering into a substantially low power consumption mode between the predefined times, such that the ratio of transmit plus receive time to idle time is within at least one of the following ranges: 100 to 300,000, 100 to 500,200 to 1000, 500 to 2000, 1000 to 10,000, 1000 to 5000, 10,000 to 50,000, 40,000 to 120,000, 50,000 to 140,000, 80,000 to 200,000, 120,000 to 300,000, and 160,000 to 350,000; 
 
 addressing and routing information in the data packets transmitted by the plurality of devices is substantially absent such that the number of bits constituting the addressing and routing information is within at least one of the following ranges: 0 to 5 bits, 0 to 4 bits, 1 to 5 bits, 2 to 6 bits, 2 to 4 bits, and 3 to 5 bits. 
 
     
     
       2. The method of  claim 1 , further comprising managing data traffic among the plurality of devices and the at least one gateway device, and separating the plurality of devices into one or more logical zones. 
     
     
       3. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the routes within the network are preconfigured and a substantial portion of the plurality of devices forming the network know the sequence of the devices forming a route, with the substantial portion corresponding to at least one of the following percent ranges: 40% to 99.8%, 50% to 70%, 60% to 85%, 70% to 90%, 85% to 98%, 90% to 98%, 95% to 99.5%, 98% to 99.8%, and 99% to 99.8%. 
     
     
       4. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the data transmitted by at least one of the devices is delimited using delimiters, which function as placeholders indicating that a particular device had no data to send. 
     
     
       5. The method of  claim 1 , wherein at least a portion of the devices along a route append their messages up to predefined length. 
     
     
       6. The method of  claim 1 , further comprising monitoring the plurality of devices to generate an alarm when one of the devices fails or re-routes traffic around a failed device. 
     
     
       7. The method of  claim 1 , wherein at least one device reports a change in its state by sending a message to the central computer, which acknowledges the change and specifies a period of time during which the device is not allowed to transmit the change in its state in order to prevent unstable events from cluttering the network. 
     
     
       8. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the network, to reduce collision recovery time, is partitioned so that only a portion of the devices are allowed to transmit simultaneously, wherein devices within the portion use predefined back-off periods that are at least slightly different with respect to at least one other device within the portion in case of a failure to receive an acknowledgement of successful transmission. 
     
     
       9. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the network comprises a prolonged topology that maximizes the achievable distance enabled by a baud rate and RF link budget, such that the network comprises between 500 and 50,000 devices that form a path that is between 5 and 500 kilometers in length.